On another board, a poster claims to have solicited comments from Egyptology professors at UCLA on a series of Book of Abraham apologetic videos posted on Youtube by BYU professor Kerry Muhlestein. He received this response from Kara Cooney who gave permission to use her name. If this response is genuine, it gives us some idea of the credibility of mormon egyptologists among their non-mormon peers.

"I watched the three videos, and I don't agree with any of it. The ancient Egyptians had no concept of Abraham, so I don't know where he gets these comparisons… And No, most Egyptologists do not agree [with Kerry's conclusions], despite what Kerry says. I know Kerry, but I do not have much respect for his work. Now I have even less. The fact that he is digging in Egypt is even more worrisome… This PhD was awarded before I arrived at UCLA, although I know that Kerry finished his text based dissertation after only two years of Egyptian language training, which is rather laughable.

"Have you read Robert Ritner's work about this in Journal of Near Eastern Studies? It's the best out there… Kerry is just spinning out the same Mormon rhetoric. What is different is: Mormons are funding PhDs in Egyptology and Biblical Studies and then funding positions at BYU and elsewhere and passing these people off as experts, when they are only ideologically driven researchers, not experts interested in actual evidence.

"Thanks for sending. It's important to know who these people are"

Sounds about right. I watched Muelstein's video and noted the following:

1) He didn't back up anything he said with any data or references. At all. The entire video was an appeal to authority - since he has a PHD from UCLA whatever he says is true.

2) He presented all kinds of red herrings that had nothing to do with the real issues. He would even admit beforehand that they weren't important in many cases...

I've gotten hung up on a claim Kuhlestein made in the first video. He said, and FAIR seems to agree, that all the eyewitnesses said that the Book of Abraham came from the long scroll, and not the part that we have today. I've been fighting through FAIR's weeds to try to get at their substantiation for this claim, but so far have not turned up one single quote or document from an eyewitness to back this up. In fact, it seems that FAIR admits that W. W. Phelps said otherwise.

Can anyone help me? Where is the evidence that eyewitnesses connected the Book of Abraham to the long scroll, and not the mounted fragments we have today? Is this another one of their lies?


UPDATE: I just found one quote they cited by Joseph F. Smith, who could have been no more than 5-years-old at the time, who said 62 years after the fact that one of the rolls "when unrolled on the floor extended through two rooms of the Mansion House." Since Joseph F. Smith thought this was the source of the Book of Abraham, and since this doesn't perfectly describe the mounted fragments, I guess it qualifies as an eyewitness substantiating Kuhlestein and FAIR's claims. Heh...



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2013 01:51PM by kimball.

Maybe you guys know all about this, but it ticks me off when the footnotes are BS.

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/pdf/review/3009375837-19-2.pdf

Page 10/16 (2) “a long roll of manuscript”35 that contained the Book of Abraham; 36

Footnotes 35 and 36 are as follows:

35.
Charlotte Haven to her mother, 19 February 1843, printed in “A Girl’s Letters from Nauvoo,” Overland Monthly 16/96 (December 1890): 624, as cited in Todd, Saga of the Book of Abraham , 45.

36.
Jerusha W. Blanchard, “Reminiscences of the Granddaughter of Hyrum Smith,”Relief Society Magazine 9/1 (1922): 9; and Haven to her mother, 19 February 1843.

Due to the wonders of the internet I can find the texts of both of these.

Here's a girls letter from Nauvoo:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ahj1472.2-16.096/622:9?page=root;rgn=full+text;size=100;view=image

And here's the Relief Society Magazine:

http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/relief-society-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-d/the-relief-society-magazine--organ-of-the-relief-society-of-the-church-of-jesus-ile-5/1-the-relief-society-magazine--organ-of-the-relief-society-of-the-church-of-jesus-ile-5.shtml

The first one has NO mention of the rolls or any connection I can discern to the book of Abraham.

The second one is from 1922. It is a story written by Nellie Stary Bean that is supposed to be Jerushua Walker Blanchard's memory of hiding in an old wardrobe in Emma Smith's home that had mummies stored in it and "In the arms of the Old King, lay the roll of papyrus from which our prophet translated the Book of Abraham."

They are the memories of a preschooler, recalled decades later, and as retold by a faith promoting church magazine.

Not that I'm in any way defending the Mormons and their baloney but you looked at the wrong letter - http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/ahj1472.2-16.096/630:9?page=root;rgn=full+text;size=100;view=image. The reference to a long roll is 5 lines down on the left hand side. That whole letter is fascinating - Joseph 'talked incesantly about himself'

You're right, I didn't realize it was a series of letters. I only read the first one. Reading the correct letter we know that the author thought it was all hokum. I did not know that Joseph's Smith's mother had her own Ripley's believe it or not museum.

So we've established that there was a roll that was being displayed by Lucy Smith.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2013 07:26PM by crom.

Thanks. It looks like Charlotte is the only half-way decent source they have. Of course, it's problematic in many ways, least of which being Lucy Smith saying it was "the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit." Not a very good tie to it specifically being the Book of Abraham that we have today, but I guess apologists will take whatever they can get.

Well I read through all the letters. They were actually pretty interesting, Nauvoo from a gentile's perspective.

She describes Joseph Smith in very unflattering terms. But has only nice things to say about Emma. She describes the Mormons as living in absolute poverty while Joseph Smith is in a mansion and everyone is putting a lot of effort into the Temple. She meets Sidney Rigdon and guesses he really wrote the BoM. She was there when the Kinderhook plates arrived and Joseph said the writing match the BoM writing.

She sees all kinds of odd behavior by the mormons, one man whose children needed food said God gave him a vision telling him the store window was unlocked and to take the food, and a woman speaks in tongues but no one can interpret. People carry peep stones and look for missing/stolen items. Some people offer their services to peep into what your relatives back in the old country are doing. She describes what I think is something akin to a gospel doctrine class.

"All are at liberty to speak, and sometimes a subject is discussed. One evening it was baptism for the dead. There were only two or three speakers on that subject, and their minds were of such a description as to throw into a maze of confusion every subject they touched. They pretended supreme wisdom, and expressed their views with that smiling self satisfaction that denotes that all truths have been revealed to them by some superior power, and they evidently regarded all other Christians with painful compassion."

Oh she is astute.


Word comes that Joe has been arrested and she's sees the mob assemble and take off to go rescue him, and their triumphant return with Joe. She sees a missionary return with a wife and child although he already has a wife and child living in town. Smith reassures everyone that this is going to work out. She hears rumors about polygamy and correctly predicts that only ruin will come of it.

Goes to a party given by the Smith's where everyone is charged $1 to attend. Sees a "for time only" wedding. Moves into the new house that they have built - but is already planning on leaving for St. Louis.

And that's where it ends.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2013 05:22PM by crom.

Abraham 1:7,12

7 Therefore they turned their hearts to the sacrifice of the heathen in offering up their children unto these dumb idols, and hearkened not unto my voice, but endeavored to take away my life by the hand of the priest of Elkenah. The priest of Elkenah was also the priest of Pharaoh.

12 And it came to pass that the priests laid violence upon me, that they might slay me also, as they did those virgins upon this altar; and that you may have a knowledge of this altar, I will refer you to the representation at the commencement of this record.

---

In the text Abraham clearly states that fascimile 1 is attached to his record.

---

There is no out that is even halfway logical.

Okay, I struggle with this continuously when I hear people say "But we don't have the complete scrolls."

Fact: We DO have the "facsimiles" in the Book of Abraham (the pictures)

Fact: Joseph Smith describes on those facsimiles what the figures on them represent.

Fact: None of those descriptions of what the figures represent--NONE OF THEM--match what credible Egyptologists say they do.

Fact: I have note found a single Egyptologist who agrees with Joseph Smith's description. Not one.

Therefore: Joseph Smith got that part completely wrong.

Am I missing something?

The apologetic argument for that is this:

The Egyptian translators didn't really translate it right.

We actually know more about Egyptian and we are learning new things about Egyptian that actually show that Joseph Smith was right in his translation.

Head palm.

This, unfortunately, is a problem of assymetry of information. Rightly, the Mormon apologists will argue that the Joseph Smith Papyri generally aren't taken serious by non-Mormon scholars who could care less about Mormon truth claims. Wrongly, they will then bolster up their own credentialed professionals to offer a authority opinion that can rarely be verified by the common member, simply because I lack the expertise.

I remember an Econ professor who said that during his dissertation, when he reached the part of his arguments that he knew were the weakest, his strategy was to simply overwhelm the board with math. Not that they couldn't do math, just that they generally weren't going to check all of his equations of assess his logic.

The same goes here. This Muhlestein fellar raises some interesting questions. Unfortunately, he raises them on such a level that I couldn't really know whether to take them serious or not. Not because I'm not smart, but because I don't plan on devoting my life to the study of ancient Egypt. We can of course solicit other expert opinions, but I can only make a probabilistic assessment on the basis of the number of opinions, but I can't adequately evaluate some of the more complex rebuttals.

Given this, I tend to prefer to meet the Mormon proposition where it belongs, ie, with The Book of Mormon. Not the archaelogy, but Moroni's promise. It seems like an iron clad assertion to me, that if The Book is "true", then I should expect God to reveal that to me. If God chooses to operate on his own timetable, as many Mormons like to suggest, then he is of course welcome to that. He's just not welcome to expect me to behave as though it is true, until he shows me that it is. Until then, I will keep believing that the weight of evidence suggests otherwise.

Academically it's an enticing proposition that good scholarship could prove Mormonism true. Theologically it is absurd to think that God's plan is so complex that it requires a Ph.D. in a rather obscure field to verify. That we could all be egyptologists so that this matter of the Book of Abraham could finally be resolved on an academic basis. It just doesn't work for me. Even if Muhlestein can prove the Book of Abraham is an improbable work of fiction, he is still confronted with the problem that Mormonism can't produce real angels, real revelations, and real deities!!

If you want to believe, any excuse is excuse enough.

I don't care if JS had a couple of miles of scrolls. We HAVE the
fragment that he "translated" into the opening chapters of the
BOA. It's pagan funeral stuff having nothing to do with the
BOA. The "missing scrolls" argument is a red herring designed
to pull you away from the real truth which is devastating.

The lost source of the Book of Abraham has been found!!!

See 'Egyptology and the Book of Abraham,' by Stephen E. Thompson, at: http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,809528



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/27/2013 11:23PM by steve benson.

A true blue mormon facebook friend drives me nuts by posting viral e-mails that were already debunked years ago. When you give him the link that says it's fake he get pissed off. He then goes into what I describe as "It doesn't matter if its disproven its still true" argument.

He would say that the Book of Abraham is inherently true because Joseph brought it into the world. The way it was brought in doesn't matter, and beside it's just mormon haters persecuting us.

I think it boils down to this: The first, only and last article of faith is that the church is true and Joseph was a prophet of God. If this is not true, he is the victim of a con, the perpetrator of a con because he taught lessons and bore witness of it, and a horrible parent because he taught it to his kids.

It is literally too awful to allow himself to think about it. (Besides he's had a lifetime of self censoring his own thoughts.) He won't read a whole paper, once he sees where it is going he will wave his hand at it and say, " oh that's just bunk" and grasp onto ANYTHING that will let him believe what he needs to believe.

Apologists don't have to be credible, that just have to be handy.

Apparently Nauvoo didn't have any accommodations for the mentally unstable and downright insane.

Forgot to mention. Nobody mentions the urim and thumin. Only peep stone / seer stone.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2013 01:11PM by crom.